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| THE WESTERN: FROM SILENTS TO THE SEVENTIES by George N. Fenin and William K. Everson A review by David Pietrusza |
| THE WESTERN: FROM SILENTS TO THE SEVENTIES by George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, Penguin Books, New York, 396 pp. Serious discussion of the Western film are few and far between. Most discussions of the genre fall into the category of fan magazine filmographies with little real critical evaluation or intelligent discussion of the achievements of the makers of such sage-brush sagas. Standing apart from this tradition of sloppy scholarship and publicity department hackwork was a 1962 work by George Fenin and William Everson, an in-depth study which went far beyond the norm and raised the level of discussion about the Western to that of serious cinema criticism. At hand is an updated version of that work. George Fenin has added two chapters to the volume detailing developments of the last decade, events which have moved the form further away from the stereotyped images of the past and which gave given a new vigor to the one American film style that has attained universal appeal with global audiences. Despite these valuable additions, however, the sections on the silent screen still stunningly remain the high point of this history not only and make this volume absolutely must reading for the serious student of screen westerns but also a necessary reference point for the aficionados of the silent film. From Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery to the westerns of D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince, to the ultra-realism of the great William S. Hart to the showy and stylized presentations of Tom Mix and a host of imitators, this is an estimable record of the silent tradition. It is little remembered that the very earliest of Westerns, such as those of Hart, cared little for the Wild West Show formulas and insipid plottings that often characterized the form and which led to such sugary confections as the “singing-cowboy” or the run of clichéd characters and scenarios that made “Western” and “Grade B” almost synonymous. It is one of Hollywood’s ironies that William S. Hart, the stone-faced man who stood more than the rest for the authentic mode of Western drama, who (although he did spend part of his youth in the 19th century West) was a born Easterner and originally a Shakespearean and Broadway performer, while Tom Mix, the originator of the showy, glamorous, ersatz Western form was a Westerner to his very core who owned a ranch, fought in Mexican revolutions, did stunt work, won rodeo prizes and captured bandits as a real-life sheriff and U.S. deputy marshal. For some time the Western was needlessly split between two disparate forms—the “B” series, nurtured by such stalwarts as Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson, and Buck Jones; and the “epic,” exemplified by such films as The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, Red River, and Stagecoach. Comparatively rare were good, solid, medium-budget pictures. With the coming of television Westerns (for which the authors care little) the “B” series oat-burners died. Replacing them were, of course, individual “B” pictures and some new forms as well. Sexual themes, psychological motifs and the new stereotype of the noble and exploited Red Man came to the fore. The Italian “Spaghetti” Western and such Sam Peckinpaugh offerings as The Wild Bunch saw the genre take an increasing turn toward violence and graphic brutality. Along with a more-or-less chronological treatment of the topic, The Westerns offers fascinating chapters devoted to such little noted facets of the subject as stuntmen and second-unit directors (those men responsible for the vivid action sequences that enliven even the most ponderous of these sagas), the form’s perennial international audience and home-grown competition, and the continued-next-week format of the Western serial. The bottom line: The Westerns is indispensable for those interested in either the Western per se or the art of cinema in generally admirably written and scrupulously researched. |